Green Room, written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, is a revenge thriller set at a rock venue where a hardcore punk band is trapped in a Green Room facing off neo-Nazis after witnessing a murder at the club. With its one-location setting and the constant Nazi threat, Saulnier’s follow-up to Blue Ruin is intense, bloody and also quite dark-humored. It’s a…
French auteur Jacques Audiard received the Palme d’Or for his refugee thriller Dheepan at this year’s Festival de Cannes. Before his big win, Audiard competed for the prestigious award twice; in 2009 with A Prophet and in 2012 with Rust and Bone. Both years the Palme d’Or went to Michael Haneke, although Audiard received the Grand Prix at the Cannes…
The second and only other animated feature that screened in Cannes in an out-of-competition slot besides Inside Out was the first ever animated adaptation of one of the most beloved children’s books directed by Mark Osborne: The Little Prince. The timeless story by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry about an aviator who meets a small prince and learns about his…
The new Pixar animation film Inside Out had its world premiere in an out-of-competition slot at the Cannes Film Festival and opened to rave reviews. Directors Peter Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen take their audience on a spectacular trip inside the mind of an 11 year-old girl who struggles when having to move away from her Minnesota home because of her…
Editor’s Note: The following capsule reviews are part of our coverage of the 2015 Cannes Film…
Youth is directed by Paolo Sorrentino and marks his second English-language film after This must be the Place. The visually beautiful and thematically sophisticated drama tells the story of Fred (Michael Caine), a retired composer-conductor and Mick (Harvey Keitel), an ambitious director, who spend their vacation in a Swiss spa on the foothills of the…
One of the most anticipated films of this year’s Competition – that also lived up to its expectations – includes Todd Haynes’s lesbian love-story Carol, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt by screenwriter Phyllos Nagy. When the novel got first published in 1952, Highsmith used an alias because of its daring subject matter at that time…
Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the Croisette after winning the Un Certain Regard prize for his bizarre feature Dogtooth back in 2009. This year the Greek director moves up in the ranks of the festival by competing for the Palme d’Or with his star-studded English-language dystopian love story The Lobster that can also ironically be described as a satire of our…
Natalie Portman’s directorial debut A Tale of Love and Darkness screened as a Special Screening during the Cannes Film Festival, giving her the opportunity to promote this first film at the festival outside the competition unlike her actor-turned-director fellow Ryan Gosling, whose debut feature Lost River screened in last year’s Un Certain Regard and received mixed and harsh reviews…